Ja. Things change, fair enough. And it’s all very well trying to remove the President now.
Equally, it’s all very well to say that it was a mistake for the ANC to promote and elect him in the first place.

Unimpressed with someone? Trace their ancestory back a bit, apply a liberal dose of anti-constitutional xenophobia and suggest they leave the country, post-haste.

Julius Malema was at it last week, with his typically edgy, borderline xenophobic comments about curry and the Guptas, before telling his adoring audience that the well-connected Gupta family “must leave the country with immediate effect”. Here are some t-shirts on sale so you can wear your xenophobia in case your voice becomes a bit hoarse from constantly shouting about it.

And then today, there was this gem from Ses’Khona spokesperson Sulyman Stellenboom (just one R away from perfect nominative determinism), who gave us this line on Western Cape Premier Helen Zille:

Zille is a ‘germ from Germany’ who must ‘go back where she came from’

Magnificent. Aside from the fact that Zille was born in Joburg, that is. And the fact that it’s repulsively and unnecessarily xenophobic. Maybe Sulyman and the Surly Man both had this feelings poster on their respective bedroom walls. Or maybe they’re just attention-seeking twats using the media’s love of hyperbolic soundbites, and carefully drawing on the populist element of South Africa’s rich recent history of not liking people from other countries very much.

Who knows?

It doesn’t even make sense though, does it? “A germ from Germany”? People from Germany are called Germans, not germs. Germs is a generic term for bacteria. Helen Zille may be many things to many people, but she’s clearly not a single-celled, prokaryotic, pathogenic micro-organism. Nor is she the reproductive part of a cereal. Obviously not.
What was the idiot thinking? Does he also think that Angolans deserve to ‘ang? Or that people from Sweden are merely thinly-veiled turnips. Ooh, and don’t get him started on the Finnish.
The bloke’s a tosser. From… Tossland.
Or something.

Later on, there’s going to be some fighting around Parliament as all the different groups, cultures, colours and various party supporters meet in one massive congested space in Cape Town CBD and the police struggle to keep them apart. The media will love that too.

Anything inflammatory. Which is exactly why Julius and Sulyman keep spouting their xenophobic crap – because they know that’s how they get heard.

Our forefathers thrived for many years under difficult moments because they cherished free press and freedom of expression.
Banning newspapers simply because we disagree with them and boycotting them on the basis of believing that our conception of truth is absolute really poses a real threat to our democracy.
Even when we expressed utmost anger against a BBC Journalist in a Press Conference incident which we later apologized for, we never took a decision to ban the BBC or the Journalist from our Press Conferences, because we need to protect everyone space to disagree.

I’m not going to get into the Charlie Hebdo thing. I don’t have the time or careful articulation to express my feelings accurately. I even had to call it a “thing” to avoid using a term that might be considered inappropriate by one side or the other. And therein lies the problem: people are taking sides.

An incident which should perhaps have the power to be either divisive or uniting seems (disappointingly, but maybe unsurprisingly), being used exclusively as the former, rather than the latter. An opportunity (albeit a difficult one) missed?

There are about a million (I counted and read them all) different “thinkpieces” about the whole thing already, but here are a couple of them which I found most interesting, with a nice passage from each:

…it’s a glib, and oftentimes lazy, inference to draw that it’s “religion” that causes these things. I would think it rare that religion per se makes you homicidal, but that instead, folk who are capable of such things will find religious inspiration for doing them.

If your religion allows you to be led to such barbarism, there’s barbarism in you to be exploited. That doesn’t mean that religion X (or ideology X) cannot be a causal factor in barbarism more often than religion or ideology Y.

and:

Other issues are perhaps not as easy or unambiguous as we might prefer. For starters, the right to express a view doesn’t always mean it’s a good idea to do so.

What does it achieve when role models sing Dubul’ iBunu?
And yet these individuals make a conscious decision to do these things. Why? Where is the value in that?

It’s more than just the lack of any positive worth in these actions that depresses me. It’s the fact that these things are divisive and harmful and yet they are completely avoidable. Julius Malema, Councillor Greyling et al. simply need to make better decisions.
So, rather allow Malema to sing Dubul’ iBunu and then rejoice when he chooses not to.

And then this, on the possible deeper motives for the attack, from Informed Comment:

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the Rights of Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful minority will take advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity to push their own agenda. Europe’s future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to become mainstream. Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.

1. The preservation of the right to free speech is imperative, and
2. One cannot and should not conflate the views and actions of (religious) fundamentalists and extremists with those of everyday followers of religion.

But then there’s this sort of thing:

YOU MAY NOT!!! Clear enough? “@mynameisjerm: Let’s get a clear answer, please. May we, or may we not depict Muhammad in a goddamn cartoon?”

…rendering those two ideals completely and immediately incompatible. (And angering me quite a lot, as an aside. I’m not about to depict Muhammad, but that’s only because I don’t see any value in doing so (see my wish for Julius above), and most certainly not because Farah says I’m not allowed to.)